Why I Quit Marketing For Good

And it’s not about the toddler CEOs and how social media has devolved into pay-for-play lies, it’s become a discipline that tells us we’re never enough.

Photo by Henley Design Studio on Unsplash

Years ago, my work meant something to me. People paid me to tell their stories and those stories were about needs. A need to better the world or at least not leave it worse off than how we found it. A need to solve a problem, cure an illness — a need to make people whole. Here’s how we’ll make your life better, easier. You’ll have more time for the things and people you love because time is the one thing you can never get back. You’ll be smarter, fitter, healthier, happier. Now look at you now, dressed up in happiness. Bathed in light! And while I was never foolish enough to believe we were savings lives — we were merely part of a larger machine and our job was to create and spread stories — I never felt I needed to take a shower after a call or a project or a marketing plan.

Until I did.

Until I opened my eyes to the fiction that had been meticulously packaged and sold to me. Until I kept parroting you have to work hard to gain your customers’ trust and the constant refrain was always: how do I sell more faster? How do I go viral? How do I bury my hands in the new generation’s pocket? And the needs became wants and the wants forever centered on telling stories that implied the customer was never whole. They were parts incomplete. It became less about the problems a company could solve and more about how the problem was you.

You will be decrepit, ugly and alone if you don’t buy our $49.99 moisturizer. Conveniently forgetting everyone’s bodies — once gleaming, strong and smooth — will come undone. No moisturizer will save us from that one certainty. It won’t hold your hand when your final breath sputters out. Or you will be steeped in poverty if you don’t invest in our course on how to dupe desperate people into buying your course. Conveniently realizing that the only thing being taught is how to whore with your clothes on.

Or how you’re a terrible mother if you don’t buy organic for your children because how could you live with yourself shoveling pesticides and poison in your children’s mouths? Conveniently hiding the nuanced and tough conversations about American farming, big organic, USDA labeling, and why is it that healthy, decent food is now a luxury, marketed like a new handbag that’s supposedly made in Italy, but is really made in China.

Of course, marketing has always been about selling the story of the person you’ll become once you consume the good or service. Marketing is never about the product because products are inherently boring. Who cares about the litany of polysyllabic ingredients in skincare or the power of a turnip, no, no, people seek transformation, betterment and a marketer’s job has always been to define the pain point and devise a story that sells someone on a solution. The kind of parent you’ll be knowing your children are eating nutritious food, the kind of beauty you’ll have because you “took care” of your skin, the kind of savvy business person you’ll be raking in all the likes, fame, and cash money millions after you took the course on how to lie to people.

What’s disturbing to me now, at this moment, is the scale of the lie. How influencers are used to perpetuate the lie and shill that lie to others because somehow a person who’s being paid to promote a product is more trustworthy than the brand selling the product themselves.

Hey girlie, hey bestie, hey bruh — we got you. What they have is more money, what the companies have is more money, but you, you poor sucker, you always end up with less than what you started.

Companies don’t want to do the work. They don’t want to spend time and money to do good for profit. Few actually impact the communities they serve while most make tax-deductible donations. They don’t want to earn your trust, they want to scale, scale, scale, and you are merely a line item on an income statement.

Of course, it’s always been this way but social media has a way of amplifying the lies and making them gargantuan. Yes, we’ve always had commercials and advertisements and clever taglines, but now we have legions of people who look and smell just like us and they’re the peddlers of the lie. And since our phones have become real appendages the lies are all we see.

Years ago, I read a study that noted an average consumer is “touched” over 10,000 times a day by marketing. From the cereal you eat to the ads you see on the subway to the endless doom-scrolling on your phone to the LinkedIn humble-brags about all the good Company XYZ has done and you should work or patron Company XYZ because I work there — you are constantly being sold to. You are constantly bombarded with subliminal (and not so subliminal messages) that you’re not enough. You will never be enough.

All the while conveniently forgetting that in capitalism there exists no enough. There’s always more and the more is the bottomless hole you’re flailing your way down and through.

There’s always another skincare solution, another new food label or trend, another grift or online scam. And while every story has been told, the newness comes in the person and their re-telling. There will always be a new story, a new pitch, a new platform, a new link in bio, a new affiliate code.

It’s when I stepped back from marketing and spent time observing did I notice how much the storytelling I once revered has impacted me. I don’t shoot chemicals into my face or dye my hair or spent hundreds of dollars on creams that will never work and every image on social media is edited, AI’d. Lindsey Lohan is lauded for her glow-up. Demi Moore is the ideal at 62 with her nearly unlined face. I write stories in this space because I live to write and someone will always comment: how do you have over a hundred thousand followers and you’re not making more? How did I proudly publish two books with traditional publishers (a feat in and of itself) and how am I not known like the peers I came up with? Why don’t I have more social media followers because that’s the only way you can sell books these days?

Felicia: why aren’t you more? Why don’t you have more?

And for a time, I felt like a failure because I no longer make a six-figure income and have all the superficial possessions I used to have. I felt like a failure because I didn’t have status or things and it’s taken me years to unpack that. To realize that status is ephemeral, things don’t hold your hand into the afterlife. To understand that more is not better, it’s simply more. And it’s richer to be a decent person, to live a decent life.

I no longer want stories telling me about the person I could be when I’m the one who has dominion over me. I no longer want to tell people they could be more if they bought more when all they end up with is a pile of stuff and a hollowness that never seems to fill.